# Autoawsume

When you installed awsume, you may have noticed you also got an autoawsume command. This is a helper for awsume to automatically refresh role credentials.

To start auto-refreshing credentials, use the -a/--auto-refresh flag. This will tell awsume to spin off autoawsume in the background to handle refreshing those credentials. Instead of putting your credentials into your environment variables, it'll create a new profile in your credentials file prefixed with autoawsume-. It will also export the AWS_PROFILE and AWS_DEFAULT_PROFILE environment variables to point to the newly created profile.

If you use the -o/--output-profile flag, you can instead use a named profile (without the autoawsume- prefix) to store autoawsume'd credentials. With this, you could run the following command to enable auto-refreshed to be used by default among all shells on your machine:

awsume dev-admin -a -o default

Note: Awsume will not overwrite an existing profile that is not managed by awsume (noted by the manager = awsume property).

Autoawsume will look for when the earliest expiring profile will expire and wait until then, when it will re-execute awsume to refresh the credentials in the background, so you don't have to worry about needing to re-awsume your profile's credentials. It will continue to repeat this process until it cannot refresh credentials anymore (either the source_profile credentials expired or the user has requested to stop autoawsume with an awsume -k).